Poke Me In The Eye

One thing I have always disliked about Windows XP is the serious lack of themes. Sure you there is software out there that allows you to highly customize your look and everything but I personally don’t like using them as they worry me a bit. Enter Royal Noir.

The story goes that a Channel9 member who goes by the name W3bbo noticed an interesting theme being used in a television commercial and after tireless searching unearthed the XP theme by Microsoft.

W3bbo had this to say about his discovery:

During Royale’s development (the XP Media Center theme), the graphic artists also produced a black version of the skin, sans the overused “glass” effect. The result is an aesthetic black skin named “Royale Noir”, it even works with Office 2003. Since the skin was never released (or reached final adjustments) there are a few issues with it: some of the colors don’t meet the overall “feel” (they’re too purple-ish compared to the greys of the bitmaps) and the inactive titlebars are a little too dark. You’ll find it’s been signed by Microsoft and doesn’t require a custom UxTheme.dll in case there are any doubts as to its authenticity.

If you already have Royale installed, you’ll need to remove it as both of these skins share the same name.

This skin has not been released to anyone outside Microsoft, until now.

I have been lusting for a nice dark theme for ages and this theme is just wonderful and a huge improvement over the old, tired default XP themes. Best of all, since it was produced by Microsoft there is no tweaking to get it installed.

Installing is quite easy. Download the theme (link at the bottom) then extract the files to “C:\windows\resources\themes\royale noir”. Next, double click on the “luna.msstyles”. Then simply choose Noir as your color scheme.

Here are a few screenshots to show you what it looks like.

   

Pretty nice huh?

You can download it right here. Royal Noir Windows XP Theme